2023-12-20

Worthy

• (Feb 2023) Leave Anger Behind - by Bryan Caplan - Bet On It

  Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.

etc

• Ask HN: How many hours a day can you reliably do high difficulty cognitive work?

• What seven hours in London teaches me about surveillance capitalism

  London is a city of endless helpful requests coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. When I lived here, this mix of dripping corporate inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was there like a suffocating blanket, but the city had a strong counterculture to balance it out.

  • HN comments

• Not burned down yet: Gävle Goat Live Stream

• There's a Concorde Engine Complete with Afterburner for Sale on eBay

  The engine is located in Farnborough, England, and is not for sale in the US,

  • Listing ended Dec 17th: Concorde Turbo-Jet Engine, Complete with Afterburner | eBay

  • HN comments

• Just How Rich Were the McCallisters in ‘Home Alone’? - The New York Times

  The family has other trappings of significant-but-not-stratospheric wealth: they wear nice clothes and hire multiple vans to take them to the airport, yes, but when Kate is trying to bribe an elderly couple to give up their tickets from Paris so she can get home, she offers jewelry and cash, but hints that her Rolex might be fake.

• Analysis of ancient Scythian leather samples shows two were made from human skin

  • Researchers Test 2,400-Year-Old Leather and Realize It's Made of Human Skin

• 2,300-year-old banquet hall found untouched underground in Rome

• Carmakers fight massive air bag recall that may cost $10B

Horseshit

• $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

  • HN comments

• Nuclear Threats Are Looming, and Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out There

• Nobody knows what's happening online anymore | Hacker News

• Vintage IKEA furnishings fetch £32,000 at auction in Stockholm

• Tech billionaires investing to create new libertarian "network states"

• 3D Printer Works in Your Body to Repair Bones and Guts

• Waymo significantly outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles

  • HN comments

• Anti-Gun Mom Loses It Over Miniature Guns – Bearing Arms

• Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the SciFi They Grew Up on Real

celebrity gossip

• Judge Orders Release of Names of Over 175 of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘High-Profile Associates.’

  • Judge orders release of over 150 names of people in Jeffrey Epstein lawsuit

  • US judge orders names of more than 170 Jeffrey Epstein associates to be released

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Censorship and Conformity - by Dmitry Fadeyev - Falltide

  In a followup experiment, one nonconformist who would always say the right answer was introduced into the groups. The number of participants sticking with the majority fell to just 5%. A single dissenting voice was enough to inspire most people with the confidence to say what they really thought.

  What threatens the authorities is not so much the message, which is so obvious to everyone that words are not even necessary, but the very appearance of dissent. This is why censors seek to “deplatform” people rather than to redact ideas. When someone asserts a position, their stance becomes a part of their identity, even if their words are censored. It thus becomes more important for the censor to remove the messenger from a public platform than to erase his or her message, because their very presence gives others the permission to speak.

• How Solutions Journalism Is Sparking Change

Musk

• Tesla Drivers Have the Highest Crash Rate of Any Brand: Study

  • HN comments

• An abused wife took on Tesla over tracking tech. She lost

• Tesla skips employees' yearly merit-based stock compensations

  • Tesla skips employees' yearly merit-based stock comp bonus

• Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective

  • HN comments

• Tesla Sweden is delivering cars without license plates

• Elon Musk says letting workers unionize creates 'lords and peasants'. What?

• Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi finally say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump Tries To Overturn Gag Order As Judge In Different Case Rejects Bid To Dismiss | ZeroHedge

• Trump disqualified from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot by state Supreme Court - The Washington Post

  In a historic decision Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court barred Donald Trump from running in the state’s presidential primary after determining that he had engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

  • (PDF) CO Supreme Court decision

    A majority of the court holds the President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.

  • IP thread

  • On Trump and Colorado - by Matt Taibbi - Racket News

  • Colorado Supreme Court disqualifies Trump from state's 2024 ballot

  • see also (emphasis mine): 1860 United States presidential election - Wikipedia

  In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, absent from the ballot in ten slave states, won a national popular plurality, a popular majority in the North where states already had abolished slavery, and a national electoral majority comprising only Northern electoral votes.

  • "Everybody knows" the 1860 election was "all about Slavery." I wonder if history will also come to record the 2024 election as a simple referendum on the question of how Law should discriminate by Race.

  • Donald Trump barred from Colorado's 2024 presidential primary ballot

  • Trump Is Disqualified from 2024 Ballot, Colorado Court Says

  • Colorado’s Supreme Court has removed Trump from the state’s ballot

  • Colorado Supreme Court Disqualifies Trump From 2024 Ballot, Setting Up Supreme Court Challenge | ZeroHedge

  • Trump Disqualified From 2024 Ballot by Colorado Supreme Court

  • ‘This Is Dead Wrong’: Turley Blasts ‘Fundamentally Flawed’ Ruling By Colorado Court Barring Trump From Ballot | The Daily Caller

  “They had to adopt the most sweeping interpretation on every single issue. The only opinion that’s not sweeping is when they get to the First Amendment and free speech, then they adopt a narrow interpretation,” Turley said. “They suggest Trump doesn’t have free speech protections. In order to establish he was engaged in an insurrection, they go back to speeches in 2016, and they basically daisy chain these speeches to say, ‘look he’s been at this for a long time.’ I think the factual and legal basis of this opinion is really so porous that the Supreme Court will make fast work of it.”

  • Colorado Republican Party To Cancel Primary If Trump Kept Off Ballot | The Daily Wire

  “We will withdraw from the Primary as a Party and convert to a pure caucus system if this is allowed to stand,” the party said in responding to the Court’s ruling.

  • Greenwald: "they choose and think wrong"

    Western elites decided populations could no longer be trusted with basic freedoms: they choose and think wrong. That's what led to the censorship/"disinformation" regime. Now they're barring the leading candidate from running.

    Just to recall: Jack Smith could have charged Trump with insurrection or inciting one. He did not. Trump has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, criminal insurrection.

  • Booting Trump off the ballot isn't just legally correct — it's the smart move for the Supreme Court | Salon.com

  • Colorado’s Trump ineligibility ruling threatens profound disruption for the 2024 elections - POLITICO

  • Ramaswamy Threatens To Boycott Colorado Primary, Turley Rages, And Luntz Warns Of 'Backfiring' Lawfare Against Trump | ZeroHedge

• Meet Lawyer Michael Dreeben, The Man Behind Three Major Anti-Trump Operations.

• Trump acknowledges Hitler comparisons — as he doubles down on rhetoric despite GOP pushback

• Prosecutors gain access to majority of Trump ally Scott Perry’s phone

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Scammers Are Tricking Anti-Vaxxers Into Buying Bogus Medical Documents | WIRED

  On Telegram, scammers are impersonating doctors to sell fake Covid-19 vaccination certificates and other products, showing how criminals are taking advantage of conspiracy theories.

• Woman with long Covid, 55, applies to be EUTHANIZED in Canada as condition leaves her bed-ridden and bankrupt: ‘My life with this illness is nonexistent’

• Vaccines reduce the risk of long Covid in children

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Citi Suit Raises MeToo Claims at Wall Street's Top Levels

• Critics want Silicon Valley to pause. Tech leaders have another idea: accelerate

• Planned Parenthood’s Trans Hormone Business Is Booming, Creating Thousands Of New Patients ‘For Life’ | The Daily Caller

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Another example of why 'equity' is evil - by Tom Knighton

• The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction

• Poor children's school struggles not about character, attitude or growth mindset

Entertainment / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Beeper's upcoming fix requires users to have access to a Mac

  • Beeper's esoteric fix for iMessage access suggests why it's pushing politically

  • Should the Apple Store be forced to sell lemons?

• Commission designates second set of Very Large Online Platforms under the DSA

  • EU will hold 3 major porn sites to same regulations as Meta, X

  • Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat hit with tough new EU safety regulations

  • Porn viewers in EU may have to prove their age

• Judge certifies child sex abuse victim's class action lawsuit against Pornhub

• 2023 in social media: the case for the Fediverse

• Mailchimp cancels podcast after refusing to work with union producers

• The Obscure Google Deal That Defines America's Broken Privacy Protections

• MSFT announces more Xbox leadership changes as Activision's Bobby Kotick departs

• Aston Martin, Porsche Preview Bespoke Apple CarPlay Interfaces

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Did the cloud made us over-engineer some systems that could have been simpler? | Hacker News

• Microsoft.com added 192.168.1.1 to their DNS record | Hacker News

  • fixed within hours. One wonders mistake, or window of opportunity? Mistake seems the best answers. the "opportunity" side looks very slim indeed. If I was in Iran and running Windows, however, I might well double check some stuff.

• Pipe Install | pipeinstall

• WARC'in the crawler @ marginalia.nu

• The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive

  Silicon-on-sapphire's main problem was its low yield and high cost. Crystal incompatibilities between silicon and sapphire made manufacturing difficult; HP achieved a yield of 9%, meaning 91% of the dies failed.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI cannot be patent 'inventor', UK Supreme Court rules in landmark case

• Cory Doctorow Blasts AI as a Fraud-Filled Bubble

• Why do we think LLMs will keep improving? | Nikhil. R

• Tiny island of Anguilla set for $45M windfall from .ai domain

• Exploitive, illegal photos of children found in the data that trains some AI

  • HN comments

  LAION dataset does not itself contain any image data at all: it is an index of image URLs on the the public internet

  • (PDF) SIO Finds Child Abuse Images in Foundational Laion Training Set

  • AI image training dataset found to include child sexual abuse imagery

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• China's Spaceplane Has Released Multiple Mystery Objects in Orbit

• SpaceX to just miss goal of 100 Falcon launches in 2023.

• Blue Origin's suborbital rocket flies for first time in 15 months

Crypto con games

• Meta to fight criminal charges over alleged cryptocurrency ad scam

• The Hot New Market in Crypto? Trading FTX's Carcass

• Binance to pay $2.7B fine after hiding shady transactions from feds

• The SEC attaches a string to Bitcoin ETFs–and we will be the one to pay for it

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Toshiba to be delisted after 74 years, faces future with new owners

  • End of an era for electronics giant Toshiba

  • HN comments

• The Housing Shortage Is Larger Than You Think

  • HN comments

• Americans rush to buy houses as prices hit new milestone

• EVs pile up at U.S. dealers as inventories hit record high

• 84% of Americans are worried about the economy. So why do we keep buying things?

• BlackRock's Claim of Green Investment Has Always Been a Sham

• IBM buys 50-year-old Software AG's enterprise tech units for €2.13B in cash

• Electric scooter company Bird files for bankruptcy

  • Bird files for bankruptcy after going public in 2021

  • Bird Electric Scooter Company Files for Bankruptcy

  • Bird, once primed to be the Uber of electric scooters and valued at $2.5 billion, just filed for bankruptcy

• Have wages “really” increased since before the pandemic? - Angry Bear

• Inflation adds new accredited investors, SEC says

• LNG Shipping Rates Slump on Lower Demand Despite Red Sea Chaos

• US Consumer Confidence Rose In November, But 'Family Financial Conditions' Worsened | ZeroHedge

• The United States is producing more oil than any country in history

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Republicans slam broadband discounts for poor people, threaten to kill program

• Pravda in DC: Biden is reluctant to accept his "old age," aides say

  Biden pushing up against his limits sometimes creates a cycle in which he wears himself out, then appears fatigued during public events — which can increase concerns about his age,

  He is his own worst enemy when it comes to his schedule," a former Biden aide said.

  "Since he first ran for Senate, President Biden has always been a hard worker who is eager to do more than any schedule could accommodate," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Axios.

  One former official told Axios: "His age is clearly something voters are worried about, fairly or not, and yelling, 'Nuh-uh' isn't cutting it."

  • Biden told to rest, insists he ‘feels so much younger’ than 81: report

• This Horrible Congress Is Even Worse Than You Thought

• Gulf oil lease program smallest in history as Biden bets on future offshore wind | Just The News

• Aidan Maese-Czeropski: Boss warned him about Instagram photos

• (2008) Biden's Cozy Relations With Bank Industry — ProPublica

• Minnesota unveils new state flag after decades of criticism of previous design | CNN

• Confederate Memorial at Arlington will be removed despite GOP opposition.

  • Removal of Confederate memorial can resume, judge rules : NPR

• California energy officials vote to extend Diablo Canyon operations

• Kamala Harris to launch nationwide tour in 2024 to promote abortion rights.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Armed Robbery Foiled When Getaway Car Is Stolen by Another Thief.

• Rite Aid Banned from Using AI Facial Recognition for Five Years

  • HN comments

  • Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

  • Rite-aid banned from using facial recognition for 5 years by FTC

• He Stole Hundreds of iPhones and Looted People's Life Savings. He Told Us How

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Clarifying the Red Sea situation

  • US, Allies Opening New Front in Middle East With Escalation Against Houthis Over Shipping Lanes | naked capitalism

• The Military Is Collapsing Under The Weight Of Its Own Wokeness.

• Xi told Biden at summit that China will reunify with Taiwan

World

• The Ministry of Justice is engaged in historical vandalism

• Canada turns to a post-war strategy to battle housing crisis

• Japan chooses 'tax' as kanji of the year amid concern over cost of living

• Amid housing crisis, Canada registers world-record immigration influx

• America Had ‘Quiet Quitting.’ In China, Young People Are ‘Letting It Rot.’

• Tesla and Mercedes-Benz to compensate for loss of German EV subsidies.

• China Rebuilds Secretive Base for Nuclear Tests

Israel

• Gaza hospital chief admits to being Hamas commander, using clinic as military base.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• And It's Gone: "War In Ukraine" Quietly Scrubbed From WaPo Masthead

Health / Medicine

• US Workers Overuse Cold Medicine Due to Office Sick Shaming Fear

• U.S. Life Expectancy Rebounding After 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic

  The increase in life expectancy would have been even greater if not for the offsetting effects of increases in mortality due to influenza and pneumonia (25.5%), perinatal conditions (21.5%), kidney disease (13.0%), nutritional deficiencies (12.6%), and congenital malformations (5.9%).

• A Fifth of US Hospitals Have Been Warned over Secretive Prices

• We Know How to Put People on Ozempic. Do We Know How to Get Them Off It?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The nation's capital, built on water, struggles to keep from drowning

• Australia Bans Engineered Stone, Workers Elsewhere Demand The Same

• The Private Equity Firm Tapping America's Spring Water

• Hurricane Larry dumped 100k microplastics per sq. meter per day

• Flowers 'giving up' on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate

• EV school bus rollout off to slow start despite billion-dollar subsidies

• Human activity has driven 12% of bird species extinct

• A Record Number of Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters Hit the U.S. in 2023

• Scientists want to put a 'sunshade' in orbit to fight climate change

• Traces of sunscreen agents in the snow at the North Pole

• Coffee firms turning away from Africa as EU deforestation law looms